Birthday presents

Remember when I wrote about buying those watercolour pencils? I have been using them! Instead of regular birthday cards, I have done some art projects for my buddies with birthdays this month. Here is the roundup:

Camilla has a big birthday this week. She studies the interaction of visual demands with neck pain, so I made this watercolour schematic of the visual system for her office. Nerdy! Happy Birthday Camilla!

Georgina’s birthday is the same as mine. She is a curious scientist-engineer, and also very crafty. Her painting shows ‘curious Georgina’ the monkey sewing Olympic Opening Ceremony costumes (which Georgina actually volunteered to do over several weeks this winter). Happy Birthday Georgina!

This one might seem a little incongruous with the last one, but they happily coexist in my head. OIVer Christmas Graham and Nathan and Dave and I joked talked about the underside of the Olympics. We thought the best face of the city would be presented to the world, but not necessarily the complete story. We imagined what a more complete story might look like, and came up with the idea of a mascot who had fallen on hard times and was dumpster diving to make ends meet. What would it be like for a mascot to live in an SRO off Hastings so kids to have to navigate broken bottles and used needles to get a dirty-fur, half-hearted hug. I give you: EAST SIDE QUATCHI. Happy birthday Dave!

I found out when we went to Per’s birthday that Svend Erik’s birthday came and went in January.   This painting shows an octopus doing different kinds of musculoskeletal research with each arm (left to right, roughly): one arm holds and EMG device that is testing the second arm;  arm 3 has a screwdriver for assessing field work;  arm 4 has a lever which is used in lab studies to approximate repetitive fatiguing arm work; next there is an arm holding an optometrists eye tester thing up to the octopuss’ head (this ended up looking more like phantom of the opera, but trust me, its the optometrist thing); the sixth arm has a goniometer, which is used for measuring range of motion in rehabilitation;  arm 7 has an Erlenmeyer flask for biochemical testing of muscle metabolites, and can you guess what kind of statistical procedures are performed by the eighth arm?  10 points if you said BOOTSTRAPPING.  Happy birthday Svend Erik!